汇聚全网市场资讯

Part I. Introduction

The purpose of MSPA (Mystery Shopping Provider Association) is to improve service level of mystery shopping industry and advance the development of the whole industry. The main goal of MSPA is to ensure correct execution of industry code. In order to enhance industry value and reputation, and strengthen the extensive use of mystery shopping, it’s very important to correctly deliver the service information to various business groups and the public based on compliance with national constitution, laws, regulations and related policies.  

The above code should be implemented in the combination with MSPA industry standard and national laws and regulations. The main goal of the code is to improve professionalism of the industry and ensure the operational consistency among MSPA members.  

Part of the mystery shopping code is listed as follows, 
MSPA industry code is applied to members and sub-contractor in order to restrict their behavior. The code clarifies that MSPA members should be aware of and abide by the code of conduct and operational regulations. Any members that violate the industry code will suffer the consequences of re-training of business code, and in more severe cases they might be disqualified as member.  

It’s highly suggested that members should strictly follow the industry code and its regulations.  

If you want to know more about industry code, please contact with board members of MSPA Asia Pacific 

神秘购物研究的定义 

Definition of Mystery Shopping： 

Mystery shoppers, who were trained or under guidance, experience customer service as potential or real customers, and then evaluate and give feedback in an objective way. 

General Principles of Mystery Shopping 

Regulatory Principle 

The aim of mystery shopping is to provide clients with management information regarding service quality or service procedure, so as to help clients better design staff re-training program, and as a result improve their service level and customer satisfaction. The result of mystery shopping can’t be the only reason to fire or criticize employees.  

Any service provider should make sure that their clients have fully understood the industry code. The counterparties should reach an agreement on the code and treat it as the foundation for future projects.  

The project execution process should follow the national laws and regulations of the place. 

To ensure the normalization, staffs from clients’ side should be informed in advance that their performance will be evaluated by mystery shopping from time to time. The tested staffs should have the right to be fully informed of the possible situation when the project contractor conducts mystery shopping. The announcement should be released on company website or in internal publications. It’s impossible to notify competitor companies, but one has to make sure that the competitors and their staffs won’t suffer any adverse consequences because of the project.  

The effectiveness of any project relies on the design of survey scenario and execution situation. The factors include: ： 

     Relevancy 

     Credibility 

     Normalization  

     Practicability 

      Safety of Mystery Shoppers  

     Objectivity 

Mystery shopping is different from the traditional market research. It’s a tool to acquire business information. In general speaking, mystery shopping is used to test the service performance of the tested employee in the situation that’s oriented by the latter.  

Technical Principles 

To ensure relevancy, the survey scenario should be designed as a certain sale or service situation that’s consistent with the research topic. Taking consideration of the training regarding some unusual situations and conditions received by tested employees, in order to ensure the credibility of the research, the survey scenario should be designed accordingly and give feedback of employees’ reaction when they’re facing with similar scenario as in the training.  

In order to ensure credibility, the survey scenario should be designed as real as possible. Therefore, mystery shopper should be able to play their role naturally as part of the purchase process. Meanwhile, a comprehensive training and guidance should be conducted towards mystery shoppers, in order to make sure that they neither go too far nor are too restricted to the designed scenario. An overly sophisticated designed setting would easily raise doubts of tested employees, and they may discover the identity of mystery shoppers, thus affect the research value of the project. The general principle is: the designed scenario should be designed simple and clear, supplemented particular training of mystery shoppers regarding the way to deal with and follow up issues, in order to make sure shoppers more easily grasp the essence of each settings, and give the role they played more credibility and authenticity. In addition, the shoppers themselves should meet the standard of the targeted consumers of a certain product or service, and have sufficient knowledge of the purchased product.  

The evaluation distribution should also be credible. It’s predictable that the date, week or season could affect communication length of time between shoppers and tested staffs, as well as service the former receive. Therefore, it’s quite important for one to make sure that the onsite and telephone surveys are conducted in a series of appropriate different time and places, or under special requirement of research, conducted within the same timespan (e.g. used for comparison with Benchmarking).  

From the perspective of evaluation, in order to make sure practicability, simple and clear scenario design and proper arrangement of tasks are key to guarantee the correctness of the shopping experience feedback. It’s important to keep in mind that mystery shopper should remember all answers to the questions as long as they’re within eyesight of tested staffs. In order to achieve this, length of time and complexity of project should all be restricted.  

No matter which scenario is applied in the mystery shopping, in order not to place personal security of shoppers in danger, safety should be the top concern. For instance, safety risks might occur due to geographic location, disability, gender and race, etc. It’s significant to prevent any negative effects on mystery shoppers during the project, such as threat to personal safety, influence on one’s credit, etc.  

In order to get the real and objective information, the questionnaire should be primarily objective questions. The aim of it is to correctly arrange and file all related situation happened in the tested sites, rather than the subjective feeling of shoppers. Objectiveness contributes to the consistency of the evaluation process. Some subjective evaluation, such as confidence towards the tested staffs, satisfaction of the processing method of the tested when the shoppers raise questions, etc., On the other hand, is helpful to the explanation of the research result to a certain degree. However, it’s highly suggested that subjective questions be clearly defined and make sure the clients know the subjective part of the questionnaire and its possible subsequent result.

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